Mr. Hannity: The September 11 attack was "an attempt to decapitate our government." (p. 131)

One of the cornerstones of our great American experiment is that all persons are presumed innocent until proven guilty, and each person is entitled to representation by a competent attorney when accused of a crime.

I guess the Deputy Secretary of Defense hates the Constitution and the very principles upon which this country was founded. Why else would he threaten lawyers representing Gitmo detainees? Read on intrepid progressives, because one more nail in the coffin of this great experiment just got pounded on Friday.

The military marching through the children's playroom.The Pentagon and its corresponding military branches have been trying for years to interest young people for military service, however it is rare to find a recruiting officer who is capable of filling his proscribed quota.

In order to reverse this trend the Pentagon engaged itself in a campaign against the perceived lack of heroism. The strategy for this involved changing focus to a new social group, now it is not just adults being targeted but also teenagers and children.

Waterflake

Looks like another Reagan legacy refuses to die. This time? Star Wars.

The Pentagon wants Congress to give them some cash to build Weapons of Mass Science Fiction.

Chrs Floyd - Empire Burlesque

When I read the passage below from Moazzam Begg's account of his years in Bush's Terror War prisons, I had a strange feeling of dislocation: it was as if 30 years had suddenly fallen away and I was back in high school, reading Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in stunned disbelief at the hideous cruelty inflicted on the prisoners -- deliberately, as a carefully calculated instrument of state policy. And all of it done in the name of national security, of course, to protect the nation against "terrorists" and "traitors."

Solzhenitsyn's books -- not just the factual Gulag but also the deep-delving fiction of his middle years, the powerful First Circle and Cancer Ward -- were enormous influences on my own understanding of politics, power and morality. Years later, I was in Moscow when he returned to Russia from his long exile, having outlasted the system of state terror that had consumed so many of his compatriots. However much I had come to disagree with some of his political positions on certain issues, it was a still a moment of triumph for the deeper truths and moral courage that he continued -- and continues -- to represent.

More evidence has surfaced that Bush was not sincere when he said that we must fight a war against terror and that the war can be won and must be won. Most of us know about the UAE port deal with a country whose royal family once sheltered Bin Laden from a CIA attack that would have killed him. But there is another piece of evidence that Bush is not sincere when talks about terrorists - he considers peace activists to be terrorists.

Most of us would think of terrorists as people like Bin Laden whose purpose is to kill innocent civilians at random for political purposes. But not Bush. He thinks that anybody who expresses their First-Amendment right to dissent from the President's policies is a terrorist and must be tracked as much as possible. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer link provides a list of Washington-area peace groups who have been spied on by the Bush administration.

Multimillion dollar cold war style weaponry; absolutely. Body armor and working equipment for our troops; not so much.

Ralph Peters's recent column in the New York Post (or here) lays bare the anatomy of the very "military industrial complex" that a tough old soldier known as Ike warned us about many years ago. Writes Peters:

Our ground forces are being driven hard, with many soldiers and Marines already on their third assignments to Iraq or Afghanistan. Overwhelmingly, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps do the bleeding and dying. And even as we're able to gradually reduce our troop levels in Iraq, the need for robust land forces to cope with other looming crises is indisputable.

Yet, instead of beefing up the forces that do the actual fighting, the Pentagon self-justification process known as the "Quadrennial Defense Review," or QDR, is about to call for increasing the buy of the F/A-22, a pointless air-to-air fighter with a $280-million-per-copy price tag, while acquiring high-tech destroyers designed to defeat a vanished Soviet navy.

Welcome to the new America where the Pentagon pays private firms to provide aggregate personal information on your kids, collects it via No Child Left Behind, as well as outsources the datamining to a private firm... all with the intention of marketing their product... join the military... to children deemed "high prospects".

And guess what... you, as a parent, can't "opt out" of this data collection project. Oh sure, your kids info will go into a "suppression file", but they'll continue to collect the information and maintain the data... and still provide it to recruiters...

Welcome to George OrWell's America.

The issue has been fairly well covered, but I'd like to direct the reader to this great Salon-article by way of Der Spiegel (English version):

Inside the Pentagon, officials are arguing with Vice President Dick Cheney about a new set of US Defense Department guidelines (pdf-file) for interrogating suspected terrorists. The debate over an anti-torture bill is a sad moment for a country that once stood for human rights.
(snip)
How did we get to this point? Because the United States is bound by the Geneva Convention governing prisoners of war, and by the 1987 Convention Against Torture with its prohibitions against torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, McCain's legislation should not even be necessary.
But after 9/11, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (at that time White House counsel to the president) and others gave their legal opinion that prohibitions on "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" didn't apply to noncitizens being held by the United States outside the United States. Then, because torture, even outside the United States, remains a crime, they redefined "torture" so narrowly that almost all violent and coercive methods of interrogation were excluded. Then, because of the U.S. criminal statute making violations of the Geneva Conventions a crime, they insisted that the conventions did not apply to anyone they termed a suspected al-Qaida member.
These opinions were an attempt to provide legal cover so that U.S. personnel and contractors could engage in coercive interrogations without fear of criminal prosecution.

Please go read the whole article.